Atwood,+Margaret

Margaret Atwood



Kaleigh: Margaret Atwood is a Canada writer born in Ottawa in 1939. She started writing //Oryx and Crake// sooner than she thought she would due to her tour for her book //The Blind Assassin// which ended early on September 11, 2001.

Claire: She started writing plays as a young child at age six and in poetry in high school. At age 16 she committed to pursuing a career in writing. She studied at Victoria College, then completed her masters degree at Radcliffe College. She also studied at Harvard. Through out her life she has alternated between writing poetry and prose. Her peoms are often more private and personal, where her prose is more public and social expression. In both her poetry and her prose, she writes with a vivid, witty and exact style. She has won more than 55 awards including two Governor's General Awards for her writing. She has had her writing adapted for movies and plays. "World Biography." //Margaret Atwood Biography//. Web. 12 Mar. 2012. .

for //The Robber Bride//, London U.K., 1994 ||
 * = [[image:grovesaplit2/giller-prize.jpg width="205" height="226"]] ||= [[image:grovesaplit2/kenyon-review-award-for-literary-achievement.gif width="269" height="199"]] ||
 * = Giller Prize for //Oryx and Crake//, 2003 ||= Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence

Her Novels:



//Oryx and Crake//

I like this book because it shows what the world could become after the apocalypse. Atwood depicts how this world came to be by shifting between the past and present. Showing that when people decided that they can play God, causes a multitude of problems. Some of these being the mutation of animals: snat-a cross between a snake and a rat—created by bored genius students who were messing around with DNA, pigloon-pigs who has extra organs that can be used in transplants for kidneys and such, rakunk-a cross between a raccoon and a skunk—creating the perfect house pet, wolvog-a cross between dogs and wolves—to create the perfect guard dog that you can’t befriend, liobams—cross between a lion and sheep created to fullfill a prophecy, and the Children of Crake—different colored people (different colored as in blues, greens, browns—color shades) all who have bright green eyes and very little intelligence. Being introduced to these creatures it’s easy enough for a reader to be lost in the strange and unknown world that the readers are dropped in to. Atwood however was able to hold my attention with the details of the unknown world the Children of Crake and Snowman live in. Atwood also shows how environmental warming could affect the world in the future with the noon day sun beating down in an intense heat wave and a daily rainstorm.

Review

Many people have commented about how Atwood’s novel //Oryx and Crake// is similar to //Brave New World//. Some of these similarities are that there would be three males to every one female—Crakes—with everyone being with everyone else. Earl G. Ingersoll critical essay “Survival in Margaret Atwood’s novel Oryx and Crake” he comments on how Snowman—Jimmy—is also similar to John the Savage in //Brave New World// or Bernard Marx...
 * (Click to Read More) **[[file:Oryx and Crake[1].docx]]

(Kaleigh)

//The Year of the Flood//

I like //The Year of the Flood// because it showed the same events that occurred in //Oryx and Crake// but from two other people—Ren and Toby. This made the book interesting because it allowed me to see how Ren and Toby reacted and how it compared to what Jimmy did. //The Year of the Flood// also continues where //Oryx and Crake// left off—with Jimmy preparing to shoot a stungun at two men and a girl in the woods. //The Year of the Flood//reveals that the girl is in fact one of Jimmy’s ex-girlfriends Amanda who has been a captive to two paintball players. It also shows how the other characters felt during one event compared to how Jimmy felt during the exact same one. One example was when Ren and he broke up. Jimmy hadn’t any idea why Ren wrote what she did in her diary, but when you read what Ren felt and saw—she had seen Jimmy with LyndaLee and didn’t want to be with him anymore. So she wrote what she did to hurt him. This gave me a whole new point of view to approach the novel on, as well as the characters themselves.

Critical Essay "The more we exploit nature, the more our options are reduced, until we have only one: to fight for survival" (Morris K. Udall)... ** (Click to Read More) **

(Kaleigh)



//Blind Assassin//

I chose this book because the first page presented a mystery. Why did Laura drive the car off the bridge? After reading the first page I was totally engrossed in the book, I couldn’t wait to learn more about Iris and Laura’s world. I thought that this book would focus on the Laura and Iris life leading up to the crash. I was right about that being in the book, but I didn’t expect that there was going to be another novel within the book. When the first chapter of “The Blind Assassin” appeared in the novel, I was very confused about who the people were, why they had to meet in secret, and how was it relevant to Iris. As the novel progressed I found myself trying to guess who the characters in the sub-novel were; I guessed that the man was Alex Thomas but I thought that the woman was Laura. At the end of the novel when it was revealed that Alex and Iris had an affair and were the two characters, I was shocked. I never would have expected that twist but I feel that the twist only added to how much I liked the novel. (Claire)

Critical Essay: In //The Blind Assassin// by Margaret Atwood, the main character uses the power of storytelling to reveal truths about her life and the lives of other characters. In the novel, the characters have built a façade to mask the dark side of their lives from the public. They work hard to create an illusion that they are a perfect family. Throughout the novel, Atwood allows the character Iris Griffen to expose her family’s secrets through a story told in a novel that is published and also through a letter that Iris writes for her granddaughter.

//The Robber Bride//

When I started reading The Robber Bride, I had a hard time getting into the novel. It wasn’t interesting to me and sometimes I felt like I was forcing myself to continue to read it. I didn’t like the characters; Tony constantly worried about West, Charis seemed like a hippie. I did like Roz, out of the three of them she seemed to be the most focused and determined to succeed; I admired her for that quality. It wasn’t until Zenia appeared to Roz Charis and Tony that I started to get into the book. Then it was discovered that Zenia was spending time with Roz’s son I couldn’t put the book down. I felt like I had to keep reading to see if Zenia could further destroy the women’s lives. In the end when they discover that Zenia was dead, I felt like the ending was theatrical. To me it didn’t provide closure, Tony, Roz and Charis would go back to living their lives as they had before as if nothing different had happened. I also to find that the end was sugarcoated to make it seem as happy as possible but to me it didn’t seem like the characters was actually happy. (Claire)

Review : Margaret Atwood is known for being a feminist and a Canadian Nationalist. These values clearly spill over to her writing, especially in her novel, __The Robber Bride__. Where she takes typical male roles in a society and gave them to her female characters.